Thursday, October 22, 2015

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Mr. Rob Clark (The Lone Gunman) with the finest and deepest understanding of Lee Harvey Oswald I know of, in print or audio. Here Rob blows open a door which is usually kept shut by the community, of whatever take. Too many people look at 11/22/63 with a cold eye, despite it being one of the most monstrous acts of the 20th Century. A young man, the most famous and powerful man in the world, seated next to his wife, both of them the parents of two small children, has his head blown off. FROM BEHIND. (So they say.) That is not the act of a nut, of a political ideologue, of a closet homosexual (Norman Mailer tended toward that nitwit interpretation), or of a lovelorn husband. It is the act of a monster. The act of someone capable of child murder, of mass murder, of Auschwitz. Of course, that sort of evil is not too hard to find within the US National Security State, a sort of death-worship which was the daily bread for the likes of Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, David Phillips, David Morales, Tracy Barnes, Des FitzGerald, and many others. As it is in our own day with the monsters who blow up women and children and wedding parties from within their air-conditioning drone-strike studios somewhere in Virginia or Nebraska or the Oval Office. But where is there any evidence of this sort of psychopathology in the life of Lee Harvey Oswald? Oswald, as Clark details, was never alone. He was a man who loved his family. Loved his wife, however difficult a time she seemed to give him. And who dearly loved his daughters. Baby daughters, the youngest one only weeks old when JFK was killed. So Oswald that day was not only killing Kennedy, he was killing himself, and the lives of his children as well, destroying lives that had only just begun. There is NO EVIDENCE he was that sort of man. None. Mr. Clark reminds us of that in a brilliant, funny, passionate, and unique way.

Friday, October 16, 2015

The most important political history in many a year was published this week by HarperCollins: David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Talbot -- author of the magisterial and deeply moving Brothers (2007) -- uncovers the life and enormous power of the most evil American of the 20th-century ('though Ronald Reagan comes close), capitalist gangster Allen Dulles. Dulles, flat-out WASP Nazi and little girl molester, spent his diabolical career destroying democrats and democratic movements across the world (and most certainly at home). A short list: through Sullivan & Cromwell, he bankrolled the Third Reich's extermination of home-grown and international anti-Hitler conspiracies; helped destroy the post-World War II freedom movements in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and West Germany; overthrew (or tried to) anti-capitalist governments and leaders in Laos, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Cambodia, Iran, the Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Korea, India, Egypt, Haiti, Iraq. Dulles's crowning achievement: the murder of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy; and two days later Kennedy's accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.